


Remaking the Queen

by BrokenKestral



Series: Susan's Redemption [2]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Last Battle, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:55:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24476836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrokenKestral/pseuds/BrokenKestral
Summary: If she who was once a queen gave up the heart and character of a queen, how far would Aslan go to remake her His queen once more?
Series: Susan's Redemption [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1796791
Comments: 7
Kudos: 26





	1. The Breaking at the Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Pain isn’t mine, it’s universal to mankind. Narnia, Susan, and Aslan aren’t mine either.
> 
> This is unbeta'd, so if you see any mistakes, please let me know, and I'll fix them!

“The anguish of a heart deceived and desolate” 

\--Lucy Maud Montgomery, “Each in His Own Tongue”

“If death is not a daily reality then Christ’s triumph over death is neither daily nor real. Worship and proclamation and even faith itself take on a dream-like, unreal air, and Jesus is reduced to something like a long-term insurance policy, filed and forgotten—whereas he can be our necessary ally, an immediate, continuing friend, the holy destroyer of death and the devil, my own beautiful savior.” 

\--Walter Wangerin, _Mourning into Dancing_ (p. 29-30)

* * *

They partied like they were immortal, like death couldn’t touch them. It was something that happened before their time, in the War to end all wars; it scarred their fathers and their mothers and left their grandmothers weeping, but it wouldn’t touch them, with their heels and nylons and lipstick, with their smiles and jokes at death and life. Life was theirs, and death couldn’t touch them. 

Until it did. Sara wore black for a while, and she didn’t smile at death anymore. She dropped out from their set eventually, at odds with the way the rest embraced life and laughed at death. But that was Sara; Susan had lived for almost forty years and was still a young girl (no, she _wasn’t_ that old, the other years hadn’t happened. It was all a game. That’s all it was. It wasn’t another life). Susan was the queen of this set, its most stunning beauty and its ruler. Susan was untouchable by death.

Till a train accident happened. (A train accident. They’d fought wars, giants, fled the heart of Calormen with a mere shipload of soldiers, and a single accident had taken them. All of them.

No, wait, none of that had happened. Except the accident. But it couldn’t be real, either.) Till a call from Aunt Alberta-- _crying_. Aunt Alberta never cried. But Aunt Alberta had never lost a son, either. Suddenly Susan was crying too, bent over, the phone on the floor. 

A train accident, her aunt had stammered through choking sobs. Helen, your father, _Eustace_ . Eustace was with them. They’re gone, all of them! Nearly a hundred dead, _all of them_.

James had bent over her, calling for Mary, the most level-headed of their set. The way Mary had asked what was wrong--Susan couldn’t forget it. The gentle touch to her shoulder, kneeling so her perfectly made-up eyes were level with Susan’s, and the tone that promised to deal with it, because their set could overcome the world.

But not the next one.

When Susan had told her, trying ( _so hard_ ) to be clear, Mary’s fingers had withdrawn from her shoulder, a reflexive drawing away. Because death didn’t touch them, didn’t matter; it was a _joke_. 

(Sara had never laughed at it again. And this, this was why. Death wasn’t funny when it stole your breath and shattered your heart, when it _took_.) 

Days later, Susan couldn’t care less that Mary had drawn back. But that promise, the promise in her tone, in her question, to have that promise cheated hurt. 

But Mary had still gone with her to the morgue, she and their friend Ellen, and Clive had driven them, Clive who had just said, “I’m sorry,” and it didn’t hurt the way the others’ sympathy had, and Susan remembered death had taken his wife, Joy, with cancer. 

Susan had gone in alone. ( _Alone_. Words shouldn’t hurt this much.) She’d told the examiner at the desk who she had come for, and he’d been so briskly efficient. He’d had the mercy not to make small talk. 

Her parents’ carriage car had burned, and only their personal effects survived--their rings, Dad’s metal _leg_ from the war, the clasps to her mother’s purse--but that was enough. The clasps shut together gently, the same gentleness that always radiated from their mother--had. Had always radiated. God, why was it _had?_

Peter and Edmund--their faces were unmarred. Peter’s face was resolute, strong--so utterly unafraid. (She remembered when they’d stood on a mountain, watching giants stalk forward, shaking the earth with their feet and shaking clubs in their hands, and he had worn that same look. But--the giants only threatened death, they never dealt it out. _A train_ could do what giants couldn’t...she was mixing England and Narnia now, but he still looked like a king…)

“Peter,” she called, touching his forehead. She expected him to answer, till she touched him; he felt stiffer than a wooden puppet. She jerked her hand away, clenching her fingers; this was real. He was _dead_.

She heard someone clear his throat, and she looked up. (Her hand was still clenched. This couldn’t, couldn’t be real. Narnia was more real than this.) The examiner was looking at her, patience plastered on his face and body language. He was waiting? Oh, she was there to identify them. Identify the _bodies_ of her family, because her family wasn’t alive any longer.

“My brother,” she said. Her voice was shaking. Her older brother. She turned--she didn’t want to see if her fingers had left marks--to look at her younger brother.

Edmund’s dark hair was laying over his forehead, but she didn’t brush it away. She couldn’t touch him, couldn’t know like she knew with Peter that he was dead, because dead meant _gone_. And if he could never answer her again, never look at her with his eyes and face and mind listening with the gravity of a judge and the wisdom of a king, then she didn’t want to know it, didn’t want to know that death was real. 

“Also your brother?” Brisk, kind, clinical voice, the white coat visible from the corner of her eye.

“Yes.” Yes, from the time he’d been born, to the horrid days at school, through ruling a kingdom--through changing from a witch’s puppet to Aslan’s own, through seeing redemption made real. Her brother. Death had taken her brother.

“This is the last.” The white coat vanished till she turned towards it; the examiner was already at the next cold table, one that didn’t have a sheet over the body. (Almost a hundred dead; perhaps they had run out.) It was Lucy.

It shouldn’t be. Lucy was living, Lucy was laughter and joy (“She’s so incredibly odd, Susan. Is she really your sister?”). Lucy was _young_. Lucy couldn’t be dead.

Even though Lucy never laughed at death. Lucy fought it, a diamond bottle in her fingers, love in her voice and hands that went to the wounded. She’d fought it in England, too, visiting soldiers who lost everything and sharing her laughter with them till they felt like living again.

Lucy should be laughing. This silence was wrong when she was here, the silence of death. The silence that couldn’t be broken but couldn’t be quiet, because memories haunted life when life itself was gone. 

But _shouldn’t_ didn’t matter, because Susan could see Lucy, and Lucy wasn’t moving.

Lucy’s arm bent at an odd angle, and her bloody fingers lay on the table; her face was whiter than Jadis’s had been. 

But she was smiling. Not her laughing, living smile, but still a smile of wonder. The smile that only lit her face when she’d seen Aslan. 

Susan broke, hand over her mouth, eyes closing to shut it out, shut out her brothers and sister lying on the tables, but the silence wouldn’t go away, it drowned out the words the examiner said as he took her arm and led her back to her friends. And Clive stopped the others from speaking till they dropped her off at her flat.

“Call us,” he’d told her, tone serious. “Even if it’s just to say ‘I called,’ call us at least once a day. Every morning.”

She’d nodded and shut the door, and then wished and wished they’d stayed, because she couldn’t keep the images from playing over and over again.

Peter’s wooden stance, resolute face, Edmund’s closed eyes that couldn’t see her, and Lucy’s--Lucy’s smile.

Susan had to wonder, had Lucy seen Him? Was there a lion in the middle of the train wreck, golden light falling on twisted metal and blood, stooping to touch his dear one with his nose as she breathed her last?

If he was there, _then why hadn’t He stopped it?_

* * *

In her room a Lion watched her with golden eyes. 

_There is no other way to make you a queen for your beauty of heart as well as your beauty of body, my child._ His tears dropped to the floor as hers did. _They are with me now, and I with them._

But the Lion grieved with the one who was left behind.


	2. The Darkness of Despair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Though I've known despair, I've never wished to own it. Nothing here is mine.

“The sullen indifference of despair came next, the bitterness of smouldering revolt and misery, the reckless casting away of all good.”

\--Lucy Maud Montgomery, “Each in His Own Tongue”

* * *

Upright in the wooden pew, make-up expertly applied (they needn’t know it took her four tries before her hands stopped trembling), clothed in black. (Even as a queen, when had she ever worn unrelieved black? Oh, stop, shut up, I can’t argue with myself about whether or not it happened  _ now _ . I can’t.) She didn’t look at the pity or sorrow in the glances sent her way. She looked straight ahead, at the five closed coffins laid side by side, one much shorter than the rest. Just her family. Harold and Alberta hadn’t wanted Eustace buried from a church. (“That is what funeral homes are  _ for _ , Susan. And don’t tell me Eustace would want it. Eustace doesn’t want anything now.” Her aunt’s voice had strained with grief as much as anger. “He can’t. He’s gone. Forever.”)

Susan almost wished they were in a funeral home too. The preacher  _ wouldn’t stop talking _ . She used her own thoughts to drown out the words. 

Lucy’s coffin was shorter. At least it hid her face, and that wrenching, eternal smile. For a moment she wished the dwarves had made the coffin, covered in golden stems with flowering jewels in Lucy’s favorite colors.

They’d had no need of coffins in Narnia. The four of them always came back. 

(“You have listened to fears, child. Come, let me breathe on you. Are you braver now?”) But Aslan hadn’t cared for them once they’d gone back to England. Once He told them they  _ couldn’t come back _ . 

Peter and Edmund, on either side of Lucy, like they’d been all their lives, shielding her. She had no need of shielding now, she wouldn’t ever hurt or cling to them again, slim arms wrapped around their waists or shoulders in a hug that gave even as it asked for protection. Never, never again would Susan see that. 

And their parents to the side. They’d been hurting over how Susan had changed during her trip to America; Susan had walked out on their last conversation.

She wished she had a recording of their voices, even disappointed. She wanted to hear them again. She wanted to be unable to forget the sound. She hurt with longing for the sounds and movements that would never come again. 

The pastor finished. She got up, to walk behind the coffins. Even with five, there were more than enough to carry them. Edmund and Peter’s friends from schools, from rugby teams to debate partners, her father’s war buddies, the homeless and veterans her mother had helped, and Lucy had never lacked for those who loved her. She was walking behind a crowd. 

It took many of the living to carry the dead, because the dead were so heavy. 

She didn’t remember walking through the church, but they were at the large door. She’d left her family before, walking through other doors, to escape the weight of their disapproval; the weight of their hurt. All that was left was her own hurt now. 

No, that wasn’t true. Around her the light fell through stained glass windows on row after row of black. The entire church was filled with weeping. But none of them had lost their family and Narnia and--

a lion.

She shuddered and walked faster, away from the full pews, out to the rows of parked cars, shining and hot in the sunlight. They wouldn’t let her drive, so she sat in the back seat, alone, and kept her eyes on the black hearses. The real cars, real coffins, stopping at stop lights, made it final. This was the quest--trip--her family would not return from.

Only Susan. Because Susan had chosen so often to be alone, and she’d paid for it by having the choice removed. 

She refused to dwell on the burial; she left, right afterwards. She didn’t--couldn’t--care about the others or appearances right now.

She went back to her parents house, locked herself in Peter’s room, and slid to the floor against his white door. Tears came, running down her face and leaving black streaks from her make-up, but  _ there was no one left to see _ . And that thought hurt so much.

“Aslan sees,” she heard Lucy in her mind. (God, I want to hear her voice always. Don’t let it fade.) “He can see you, Su. He hears.”

_ Aslan _ . A golden Lion who made a world and then stripped it away from them. It had been theirs, as its guardians, and he’d taken it. 

He’d taken their home from them; yes, their home. Susan couldn’t deny it now, not when all pretenses were ripped away, when all she had ever loved was out of her reach as absolutely as Narnia was, with its hills and forests and sea. He’d taken everything that had made them  _ them _ and taken their kingdom as well.

And He’d said He was in this world, just under another name.

If He was, then He’d taken away her family as well. He’d taken everything. He’d left her nothing, nothing to live for, nothing to hold, nothing to love.

She looked up, at the head of Peter’s bed. Last Christmas Ed and Lucy had given him a present together, a lion with Aslan-like eyes, and a Narnian verse Edmund had remembered scribed beneath it in Lucy’s beautiful calligraphy:

A king, a dwarf, a lion, a bird,

All things e’er seen or heard

A cottage, cave, castle, home

Are ever his, and not my own

_ His, not mine _ . 

No, they weren’t, they weren’t his, they were  _ mine! _ My parents, my brothers, my sister, mine! 

And maybe she hadn’t stayed with them, maybe she hadn’t been the sister or daughter she should have been, but they were hers still, and they loved her! And He had no right to take them!

“I hate you!” she cried, the formerly gentle queen’s voice screaming through the High King’s room at a God she’d turned away from. “I hate you, I hate you,  _ I hate you! _ ”

* * *

The golden Lion was with her still, the Lion of Judah who had died for her. He was standing in the corner of the room. He was waiting.

_ His love is patient _ .  _ More patient than her hate. _


	3. Numb

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Nothing is mine.

“She wasn’t sad anymore

she was numb, 

and numb, 

she knew, 

was somehow worse.” 

\--Atticus

* * *

The day after, Susan sat. She did nothing. Society kindly left her alone--though Clive called her. And James, though he dropped the phone in his nervousness. Susan didn’t flinch.

The day after, Susan sat.

She received visitors and loathed them. She hated the fumbling words, the compassionate looks of her friends, the inability of all humans to deal with a grief so heavy. She hated the way words weren’t enough, and hugs were worse. A centaur told her once that a human who lost all their family to a shipwreck was too wounded to be touched; any touch would press the wound. She knew him to be right, and endured the hugs with the little grace she had left, because she hated being alone more than anything else. 

But visitors only came during visiting hours, and her aunt and uncle never came afterwards. When the door closed behind the last visitor, Susan sat.

As nights went by, she tried reading, to guard off the ghosts that filled the house, the ones that reached for the plates in the cupboard, that hung the drying cloth on the hook (she started crying when she used it), or reached blindly for the glasses that were always on top of the Bible (it was her father’s favorite book; she couldn’t even touch it now). Reading kept her eyes off the faces that vanished, eyes down and mind too occupied to see the ghosts.

Until she realised that most of the books were Edmund’s. The first time she found one of his scraps of paper with a handwritten observation on it she slammed the book and fled from the living room, from memories of the books stacked on his desk in Narnia with the same handwriting, from the unbearable reminders of _him_ . She fled to her room, the only one that didn’t their things filling it, their laughter and movement and _life_ haunting it. The losses of that life she saw over and over as she saw each thing they loved. She sat at her vanity, with all the things she had loved, and looked in the mirror.

_The Gentle Queen_. She was gone. There was nothing of beauty or gentleness left in the weary reflection.

Even less was she _the Belle of the Ball_. 

She was only Susan, and the people who had cared for Susan, just Susan, were gone. She ached for their love.

The next day she sat all morning, a slow resolve building in her to no longer be helpless. To shut grief out, to conquer it and tell it no, and start living again. An hour before the visitors arrived, she locked the front door, and started moving things. Everything they lived with and loved went into their rooms.

Then she locked their rooms, unlocked the front door, and started living. 

But not laughing. 

She went to tea with Aunt Alberta. Her aunt’s hands shook all the time, tremors that clattered teacup to plate, but her head was high and her glance rigid. Neither of them cried, but Aunt Alberta told her that Susan was young, and should smile more. People expected it. 

How did she explain that the only things that made her smile were in the past, and the past was beyond touch but filling her eyes when people talked about it? When it haunted her house?

Susan came back only to sleep, walking right past those rooms with locked doors. She could almost--almost--a breathe and she would believe--that her family were behind those doors, and she could hear Peter getting into bed, now that she was home. Pretend she heard Edmund’s quiet snores or scratching pen and low mutterings about the superiority of Narnian quills. Maybe even catch the sound of Lucy’s heavy, even breathing. For just a moment, she could believe they lived, and she hadn’t seen them because of her choice. But that they lived and loved her. She could believe that, for just a moment. 

She had to, or she wouldn’t make it through the hall. Once in her room, she locked it up, as securely as their doors, and lay staring at the ceiling, pushing heavy thoughts away with plans for the next day. And so she existed.

Clive saw through it but didn’t push. James hovered. And she tried to learn to smile. Only--beauty hurt to see (it was an empty promise, empty because beauty reminded her of good things, the good things in the world weren’t in this world anymore), laughter created aches, and there didn’t seem to be much else. People were afraid to praise the grief-stricken (her empty face probably didn’t help), and Lucy was gone. 

She taught herself a glamorous smile, a patient smile, and a polite smile, and tried not think what Edmund would have said about them. 

Until one day someone complimented her, when she had her glamorous smile on. They told her she was beautiful. She’d loved that once. But now she went home and looked in the mirror, watching herself smile, watching her mouth twist in a faux imitation of life. 

Edmund would have seen right through it, and still found something beautiful within her to show her. Peter would have smiled and drawn her close, keeping her safe. And Lucy would have made her laugh. 

She broke down again, her resolution to live cracking, pieces beginning to fall, and she opened herself to the memories.

Edmund, what would you have found? What is in me that is worth loving, worth living again?

He didn’t answer. Not even his ghost. And she realised she had numbed herself so completely to their memories that she hadn’t seen or heard them in days. 

“Peter? Edmund? Lucy? Dad? Mom?”

Silence and the dark answered her. She curled into a ball and cried, in an empty house that had just lost even its ghosts.

* * *

But not its God, the golden Lion who gave life and took it away. He was there still, through the dark nights and the numb days.

_Come home, Susan. Your home and heart are locked, but I will be your home. Come and live with me; I will teach you how._


	4. Seeing and Shattering

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

\--Kahlil Gibran

* * *

She unlocked Peter’s door first. She walked in and took the picture of the lion down and set it facing the wall; she couldn’t do this under Aslan’s eyes. She went to Peter’s desk. His papers were in piles, some leftover from his studies with the professor. (Narnia’s first boy grown into a man, and beloved by them all. They had needed him when they came back; Susan needed him still. Aslan--if you’re here--why is he gone?) Some of Peter’s papers were plans he’d drawn up of a garden in England, an arrow pointing to a tree, with notes written in his curling letters on one blank edge: “Workmen’s clothes. Early morning. Ladder.” 

Next to it was his brown, hardback diary. She opened it; the last page dated the day he--the day of the train accident. (It still hurt to think the word _died_. For any life but hers. With hers it was just the truth.) She brushed her fingers over the letters; his magnificent Narnian script hadn’t changed, even through his college days. 

“The plans are set; Edmund and I will give the rings up today. Ed and I’ve both caught each other looking at them, wishing we could use them; wishing we could go _back_ \--go home. The spirit who appeared had the ache of loss and fear in his eyes, fear I know as a king, and I want to help. My Narnia. But Prof told us once he’d had the same sensation when we went through the wardrobe, and he’d found it wasn’t his adventure. It’s Jill and Eustace this time; they’re the ones who can still go back. Aslan guide them, and guard Narnia. And thanks be to you, for giving me a glimpse of it again; for sending some of us on another adventure the rest will be able to hear recounted.”

Susan stopped, her breathing harsh. Narnia had been calling to them. It’d been so long since Jill and Eustace’s adventure, she’d thought they were forever over--but they hadn’t been. Something Narnian came, and Peter and Edmund saw it, saw a glimpse of what they longed for. If the call was for them--could they have gone to Narnia?

Could they still be alive?

She let herself believe it, just for a moment; a moment of dangerous hope, because she’d already been wounded. And the crumbling of her hope hurt just as deeply as the first loss.

Aslan had said they couldn’t go back. And Aslan’s word was unbreakable. That’s why she’d turned away to begin with.

There was more, Peter’s writing growing loopier and larger, like it did when he wrote in the grip of emotion.

“We’ll all be there, all seven friends of Narnia, to see the youngest two off. Lucy asked to ask Susan to come. I wish we could, but I have said no. She is longer a friend of Narnia, hard as that is, and it is for Narnia we are going. One who has betrayed Narnia cannot come to help Narnia, till the Lion Himself pardons her. Till she turns back and asks.”

She drew back, flinching. Betrayal? Like Edmund had? She’d never--it wasn’t--she hadn’t had a _choice_ , she couldn’t be in England and choose a land that couldn’t keep them and a God who didn’t choose _them!_ It hadn’t been a betrayal, it wasn’t a betrayal if He’d betrayed them first!

“Only,” a tiny voice whispered inside her, “He did the same to your siblings, and they still stayed faithful. Still loved Him.”

And she knew it to be true. They had loved Him more than her. They’d chosen to stay with Him. And Peter’s words proved it. He’d made the decision as High King of Narnia, to do what was best for Narnia, and to let her go the way she’d chosen. Let her go a way separate from theirs.

She put her hands over her face and cried. 

She would give up all that she had ever gained in England, if it meant walking and laughing with them again.

_Living_. 

Because she’d died the day they did.

She used her shirt to wipe the tears from her hand (hardly queenly behavior, she thought--but Peter had said she wasn’t a Narnian queen), reaching to close the diary. But there was one more paragraph at the bottom.

“I cannot tell Ed or Lucy--they have enough to bear--but I wish with all my heart that Su was coming. Aslan, somehow, someway, bring her home to Narnia again.”

She set the diary aside. _Narnia_. She had loved it once too; the first thing she’d loved that she’d lost. 

Now she had lost everything, including herself. Who was she when there was no one left to love her, when even her past was denied to her?

She didn’t go into any of the other rooms that day. She went out, and if she smiled less, she also noticed that James seemed more at ease. Maybe he saw her pretending, too. Maybe honesty was better.

The next day she went to her parents’ room. Her mother had books on her nightstand (Edmund the scholar had taken after her), and her father’s pills stood in a straight row on his, but the room was otherwise spotless. Her father had never really left the military, she thought, as she noted the bed corners folded with military precision.

Anymore than we really left Narnia, she added somewhat grimly. I wonder if it was the same for him.

Only--she had tried to leave. 

And now, seeing the consequences of it, Susan wondered if she could ever be forgiven.

And if it mattered whether she was, because forgiven or not, the pain and the loss (two separate things) would stay. For as long as she lived. Stay and make life feel like death.

There was nothing to change or hold on to in her parents’ room. She sat on their bed and tried to catch glimpses of them, of the mother who taught her gentleness, the father who taught her the importance of order and of strength in suffering.

That night, Mary stayed close to her, studying her face. Susan assumed she was watching, slightly mothering, to make sure Susan wouldn’t break down.

But it happened the night after, and the next, and Susan finally asked her, more gentle than she would have before, what the matter was.

Mary hesitated. 

“You look like a queen,” she said at last. “Or--something. Something in your face looks like ‘a spirit refined’ like Henry’s always quoting.” She touched Susan’s shoulder as Susan stiffened. “I didn’t mean to make you sad--it’s just I’ve never seen you this way. It’s...compelling.”

Susan looked away, but at the memories of her mother’s gentle voice, she said a quiet thank you. And she wondered if her mother would have finally been happy, been proud, of her oldest daughter. Because whatever was in her face started drawing others as well. Not the same ones she’d been surrounded by before (except for James; he never left), the ones her mother and father hadn’t liked--but Alice, who’d lost a brother in the war, Kenneth, with a roguish scar her set had declared made him handsome and haunted eyes at certain sounds, and Edward, the quiet scholar who might grow into another judge. They brought a friend or two with them, creating a group that revolved around her, and they looked at Susan with a look she almost didn’t recognise. 

A look she’d seen from Narnians, when they’d brought the gentle queen wounded hearts with hope of healing. When her beauty bid them believe the world was good, and her strength bound up their wounds.

At first she turned away. She was too wounded to bind up any other wounds; it wasn’t fair to ask her.

But she kept turning back. Kept turning back, because their faces were written with a hurt she’d seen before. It’d been in her siblings’ eyes, when they were losing her.

And she went home and cried.

She didn’t have the grace to be a queen, not if she went back to Narnia now, and not even in England. 

Whatever she was, it wasn’t a queen.

Because she was beginning to learn what she was—broken.

* * *

_Oh, my daughter, my Gentle Queen. I give life. Come and drink, for you are dying still._

_Come and I will make you Queen once more._


	5. Before His Face

“Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?” 

\---Sylvia Plath

* * *

Susan waited a week before going into Edmund’s room. A week, to try to bear the weight of giving others hope by the beauty on her face, born from her heart. A week, because the weight was too heavy to try to bear more.

Peter’s room had been hard. Edmund’s--she hadn’t entered it since he started college, uninterested in the books and papers she knew would litter the room. She stood in the doorway and looked around. He’d changed it. And it hurt, that she hadn’t been there for those changes. Edmund had always--and now would never--read his deepest and best discoveries to his siblings. There was a depth to him most people half-feared, a depth of thought and gravity and justice. But Edmund had a gentleness her friends had never expected from the grave, wise youth, gentle with the broken. And he of the four had been the most gentle with Susan. The most to give her what her namesake once had been.

Perhaps it was because he’d also betrayed, a part of her whispered. He’d heard and heeded the call of something other than a Lion’s voice. And he knew the brokenness that came with listening to the whisper and learning to be deaf, deaf to the roar, the deep, low voice of Aslan.

Susan shuddered, as Edmund once had at Aslan’s name. Her memories of Aslan she still avoided; that loss was one she could not now relive. She stepped quickly into Edmund’s room and shut the door, cutting off the hardest memories. 

It was, as ever, drowning in paper and books. But not stacks of paper; Edmund had taken to pasting paper on the wall. The ones around his bed and desk were in neat, painstaking lines; the ones above the bookshelves and by the closest door were slightly crooked, as if done in a hurry. 

Dear Edmund. It was a momentary reaction, but the thought hurt; she hadn’t said that to him in years; not in that tone. And he loved her and would have noticed.

She knew he loved words, and everywhere he kept what they said in front of him. She walked to his bed and reached to touch the one he’d kept close by while sleeping; it had two quotes on it.

“Measure your life by loss and not by gain,

Not by the wine drunk but by by the wine poured forth.

For love’s strength is found in love’s sacrifice,

And he who suffers most has most to give.”

\-- _Streams in the Desert,_ entry on October 11th

“Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering on the sacrificial altar of your faith, 

I am glad and rejoice with you all. Paul”

Right below them was a Bible; Susan had heard her father quote that verse from Paul before, mainly before going to a war where he’d lost his leg. _I am glad_ , he’d emphasized; why did Edmund have to remind her of that? Why, she thought, turning to Aslan, did the strong have to be sacrificed, why did God’s children have to give up what they wanted? There had been _nothing wrong_ with her life; nothing wrong with dances and parties and friends; if there had, her parents would have never let her live it!

They didn’t know you were forsworn, that little voice said. That you had sworn to follow a Lion--how they would have worried at that--and that everything you loved you took because He wouldn’t give you what you wanted most. 

Oh, how persistent that voice was getting. She looked around the traitor’s room; had _he_ heard a small voice when he betrayed his family? If he had, maybe he’d deliberately made it louder later, by writing down all the things he would live by, and their cost, to drown out the other voice that whispered.

And it had made Edmund gentle, Susan thought, tears filling her eyes, not quite spilling over. Edmund had always been a king. She blinked the water back.

Beneath the two quotes, Lucy’s calligraphy was by a small piece of parchment. 

“Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen.” 

On the same paper he’d written with his bold, printed letters, 

“But you are a chosen people, a  royal  priesthood, 

a holy nation, God’s special possession, 

that you may declare the praises of him 

who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Peter.” 

He’d underlined royal. She touched it, touching the ink long dried, wondering what it meant to him. Had he--possibly--found what Aslan promised, found Him in this world? Edmund had always been the one to see connections between truths and the way they interwove; had he found the truth of Aslan here in England?

Was she ready to find it herself? She closed her eyes, brushing away the tears. She wasn’t sure she was. Not only had she betrayed him, seeking a life without Him, but she wasn’t ready to give her life back to Him again. 

Because she wasn’t sure she had a life to give.

She wasn’t sure she could take the breaking that would happen if she saw His face, the breaking inside her, because she remembered His beauty and majesty broke her. 

She got up and left the king’s room for the queen’s. 

For Lucy’s. 

For the little sister who had loved life, loved Aslan, loved her family, and who had tried unsuccessfully to hide her hurt every time Susan left. Her last memories of Lucy was Lucy struggling to smile, to give Susan joy when Susan gave pain. 

Until that last wonder-born smile on a white, white face--

Susan stopped, her hand on the knob. She couldn’t do this. Not her last sibling, not the youngest, not the one whose name meant _light_. She couldn’t lose them all. She couldn’t walk in there and make it final that Lucy wouldn’t be back there, like Edmund would never touch those papers again, like Peter wouldn’t rest on his bed under Aslan’s eyes again. She slowly collapsed against the door, sitting against it, her arms wrapped around herself. She couldn’t go in. 

She sat there through the night, cold, chilled, and crying. Each hour the clock in the hall startled her, waking her back to the darkness and loss she knew she’d chosen. And outside her sister’s room she mourned, with her heart and her mind, the life she’d lived that ended in death.

When dawn came she was watching for it, begging for it, wanting nothing else but her night to be over. And it came, hours and hours after she asked for it, and at first it was cold. The light was grey, as it always is before the sun comes up, and she got to her feet stiffly, her body aching. She went to the kitchen, hesitating at the cabinet; she knew each cup inside. Impulsively she reached for Lucy’s, needing any reminder of light right then. She made tea, walked to the window, drew up the shade, and watched the sunrise.

Watched as the world became golden, while the kitchen remained dark. When the sun came all the way up and she could watch it no longer, she turned away. She left the shade up, set her cup in the sink, and went back to Lucy’s room.

She had to do this. She could do nothing else while this hung over her heart. She wished she’d brought more tea; maybe it would have helped, she thought as she opened the door. She could have pretended she was finally come to Lucy’s room for tea, as she had so often asked. 

Oh, _Lucy_. Even on the threshold, Susan started crying.

Lucy’s room was Aslan. 

Everywhere. Illuminated with golden light (Lucy loved open windows and her room faced the dawn), there were paintings Lucy had made of Him, hung everywhere; dictations of the High King in Peter’s script that praised the Lion were placed in places of honor; and songs of Narnia in Edmund’s print were framed and hung beside the Lions. 

And all the things Susan had placed in the back of her closet, things she’d intended to throw out--one day--had been rescued and brought here. A painting of a dryad they’d found that looked Narnian. Lucy had added a lion beside the dancing form, watching over it. A shawl with a Narnian design covered the wall like a tapestry, the backdrop for Lucy’s favorite painting. Susan had always been good at finding Narnian things, even in England. She had forgotten. She brushed her fingers on the shawl; it was still soft as the swallow Ekrin’s feathers. Lucy had loved it when Susan had found it; she was radiant with joy. She’d thanked Susan and told her what a gift Aslan had sent them!

The shawl blurred as Susan cried harder. Lucy, who had seen every event in life as Aslan’s gift; had she even seen coming back to England that way, eventually? 

For there were Christian crosses beside the Lions, Edmund’s print had Bible words as well as songs, and Peter had a proclamation that dedicated his life to The Christ. England and Narnia mixed in Lucy’s room, new since Susan left, and Susan wept for all that she missed; that she missed Lucy’s coming home. For if Edmund was the scholar, Lucy knew Aslan by heart. And Susan could no longer doubt He found His Dear One, whatever world He sent her too.

But she crumbled, stumbling against the wall, knocking papers over, weeping with loss. Because she saw Him everywhere now, and in the face of Lucy’s love, the love that saw so clearly, Susan could not deny what she’d betrayed.

The one who loved her. Even when He sent her away, she could not have said He didn’t love her.

Only later, when the years had seemed so hard, and Narnia completely gone, had she said His love was not enough.

She had loved Him too. She had wept during another long, dark vigil, wept with Lucy by her side, tears cold on her cheeks through the long night near a table made of stone, at the thought He was slain, gone, that His golden light would never touch her heart or light Lucy’s face again. That her brothers were alone. That He’d left them.

And dawn had flooded her world with light, and His return had made it golden, and they had _played,_ played a game of tag, because the world had joy and life and beauty again.

And Lucy’s room brought His love flooding back, the eyes that saw souls, the forgiveness when she’d listened to fears in Caspian’s reign, the way He had always listened during the Golden Age, the way He had never turned away when she was weak. The way He was there, every single time, even when He didn’t answer with His own, golden voice.

A resurrection. Oh, Aslan, she needed a resurrection. She needed the life that only came when she saw Him. 

One of Edmund’s scripts lay before her knees as it had fallen with her; she blinked blurry eyes to pick it up away from the water falling on it.

“I am the resurrection and the life. John”

Oh, Aslan…

Come find me now.

Stumbling, she went back to the living room, back to the Bible her father read from, and took it to Lucy’s room. And in the light of the dawn, she finally sought the Lion, as He willed to be sought, in her world. And she found Him, again and again, in the cross where He died for traitors, in the promise that He was forgiveness, in the words that said he pierced soul and spirit, and in the promise that He was the life, and that life was the light of man. 

She found Him, and she loved Him, and the Lion who was also a Lamb, and also a Man, laughed and cried with her that night.

* * *

_His love is victorious. Over death, over pain. Over us. We are His, and He has claimed us, and there is no escape from that patient, enduring love. He will make us live again._


	6. Epilogue: Queen

“The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.” G.K. Chesterton

* * *

Of course it didn’t end there. That was merely the beginning. For the Gentle Queen to be made, the self-centered belle must be unmade. Or as Susan later read, crucified. And that death of suffocation held both length and pain; but “this way went the Crucified,” and where He went, she followed.

Even if the path was so, so lonely. Even when all she wanted was nothing more than Aslan near her, His voice speaking to her, and the safety of  _ Him _ . But He remained invisible, and Susan felt alone.

She found queens often were alone, even lonely; that though her first reign was as one of four, the choices she’d made had consequences, and one of those was that this time she ruled alone. No High King and older brother, no Judge and far-seeing companion, no Valiant smile to rule with her. But she had the memory of the Lion’s words.

Particularly “Courage, deart heart.” He’d said it to Lucy, but Susan held the memory of the meaning and voice close. And she knew courage was something He gave; once He’d breathed on her and asked if she was brave. She had told Him a little, and she was finding that a little was enough. Even for the lonely, for the forgiven, a little was enough. 

The smallest seed was enough for Him to grow into a queen.

So a Queen He made her.

Mary, James, and the others were the beginning, the ones who stayed, the ones who looked to her for guidance and help, the ones who leaned on her strength. And she began to realise her rule, though heavy when they gave her their hurting hearts, their scarred pasts, was a help as well. When she told Kenneth she believed in a God who fought evil and won, she remembered it was true. When she spoke with Alice about pain and told her God held their lost siblings, it was easier to believe it herself. 

And by strengthening their hearts, her own was no longer alone. Walks, talks, dances, meeting for tea in a shop not far from where Edmund studied, meeting Edward’s friends, many of whom knew Edmund, brought her back to seeing how much life abounded, even after death. Eventually (it took time) going where Lucy and her mother served and serving as well. She cried each time, at the beginning, when someone thanked her and asked if she was the sister Lucy had spoken so much about once, when they told her that her whole family must have been beautiful. But she found the beauty lasted, even beyond their deaths, in the lives they’d poured their beauty into. And the grief in her face helped her ease the grief in their legacy, for the hurting saw she was like them. Only, because of Aslan’s work, she was both beautiful and courageous in her grief, in the quiet, gentle way she brought them tea and listened to them, the way she noticed what they needed, and in the way she was neither angry nor bitter. She grieved, but only grieved. And for a moment that was a picture of her lifetime, they saw that grief itself could be beautiful.

Years passed that way, and still grief refined her, and she learned the gentleness that the broken can learn. The one that offered help in a way that bypassed pride with a gentle “me too,” and showed the hand reaching to offer help was also broken. She found the hand helping her was pierced. 

And under her guidance, many who had lived life but laughed at death learned of the piercing beauty of grief. And she saw, and acknowledged that her God was good.

But she was still so lonely. There were none left but her who remembered Narnia; none who longed for it more as they were remade into one who ruled it, longed for its specific mountains, the sound of its rivers with the calls of talking birds intertwined, the stars that lived and danced and watched those who looked up at them. Many friends said she’d left too many roots in America to be completely at home again; she smiled (no longer a fake smile), and let them think so. A smile, because she remembered her real home, and her hope that her siblings somehow made it there. And were waiting for her, a forgiven traitor, and a remade queen. 

She hoped the wait was shorter for them than it was for her. 

And one day she found out it was. One day, with another accident (a car this time), one day when she found out why Lucy smiled. 

Because the pain was intense, for minutes, as the Gentle Queen struggled to breathe, as she closed her eyes and begged Aslan for help. She heard her name called repeatedly, but it grew softer and softer, and she opened her eyes at the quiet. 

And the light, light she’d seen once before at a dawn and a Lion’s resurrection, flooded her eyes, almost blinding her to the source.

Oh, Aslan.

She was home. Even though breathe-stealing pain continued for a few minutes more, seeing the golden glory and the gentle eyes gave her more courage than she had ever asked for.

Then His nose touched her forehead, and the pain fell away, and she rose and looked at Him.

“Well done, daughter.” The voice that made the earth shake was so, so gentle, even as her eyes filled, though she laughed. That accolade was more than she’d ever expected to receive, and she curtsied, and then wrapped her arms in his mane. It was so good to be home. 

“Come,” she heard him say, feeling it reverberate through his body. “There are others waiting for you; they came down from the mountain to meet you.” 

She turned--and she was no longer in London. It was green, and before her were the mountains she had longed for--only more real, as others had said before her, more like home--the place she had been longing for even before her siblings had died.

Aslan had brought her to Narnia. 

And a few meters away were nine glorious people, their faces were as much a part of her heart as Narnia itself. 

And each of them were smiling with a joy untarnished by grief, a joy that rang through the air like laughter, and one of the queens opened her arms.

It was Lucy. Running, calling each other’s names, both queens met and held each other; seconds later Edmund spun her around and hugged her as well, Lucy’s arms falling to her waist; Peter’s arms enveloped all three. They were laughing, their names were spilling from Susan’s lips, Peter’s hand soothed her hair, and Edmund thanked Aslan in a low voice. It was relief, it was joy, it was home, it was  _ life _ . They stayed that way, holding each other, till someone cleared his throat. 

Turning with grace, the gentle queen saw Eustace grinning, Jill beside him dancing impatiently, and the Professor and Aunt Polly smiling behind them. And further than that, her own parents waited, the inborn courtesy they had taught Susan holding them back till the seven friends had met. Their own meeting came after, and Susan wept with joy to see her father healed, war no longer his home and his leg no longer metal, and her mother unshadowed by the grief she had known; there was no darkness in Aslan’s country. 

When all had met, and cried, and laughed, they turned to the one who had brought them all home, and thanked Him, and He Himself walked with them towards the mountain, words spilling from Lucy’s lips as she told her sister all that waited for her above, further up and farther in, all the joy, all the people, all of Aslan’s own, called to a place forever home. And the joy in Lucy’s voice was so deep it gave joy to them all in her joy of her sister, and Peter led them with the steps that walked forward even while his eyes glanced back at them, and Edmund, who had also known what it was to be completely forgiven unpardonable sin, walked with Susan and held her hand.

And so ones who had once been and would never again be traitors followed their Lion, for He made them always king and queen, and He led them home. 


End file.
